Eeeeek! It’s a journalist! It was hard to miss the horror screams of liberal media when some of its citizens got the vapors from a Newsmax White House correspondent James Rosen’s question.
But first, let’s start with something called “hard news.” Otherwise known as fact. This was the headline on a Politico story that caught reporter Rosen’s attention:
Poll: Voters’ doubts rising about Biden’s health, mental fitness
A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows just 44 percent of voters approve of Biden’s job performance, and 46 percent say he’s “mentally fit.”
This is the story:
A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows that voters have a growing doubt about President Joe Biden’s health and mental well-being. Joe Biden is the oldest man to be sworn into office.
Only 40 percent of voters surveyed agreed with the statement that Biden “is in good health,” while 50 percent disagreed. That 10-percentage-point gap — outside the poll’s margin of error — represents a massive 29-point shift since October 2020, when Morning Consult last surveyed the question and found voters believed Biden was in good health by a 19-point margin.
When asked whether Biden was mentally healthy, the results were almost equal. 46% said he is, and 48% disagreed. But that negative 2-point margin stands in stark contrast to Biden’s numbers last October, when voters believed he was mentally fit by a 21-point margin.
Rosen took the factual Report of the Politico/Morning Consult Poll in his hand and looked at the President of America in the eyes.
ROSEN: I am very honored to have been chosen. James Rosen is with Newsmax. I’d like to — I’d like to raise a delicate subject but with utmost respect for your life accomplishments and the high office you hold: A poll released, this morning, by Politico/Morning Consult found 49 percent of registered voters disagreeing with the statement, “Joe Biden is mentally fit.”
BIDEN: (Laughs.) Well —
ROSEN
BIDEN: Well, I’ll let you all make the judgment whether they’re correct. Thank you.
ROSEN: Well, so, the question I have for you, sir, before — if you’d let me finish — is: Why do you suppose such large segments of the American electorate have come to harbor such profound concerns about your cognitive fitness? We are grateful.
BIDEN – I don’t know.
In other words, Rosen took a factual event — a poll — and asked the President directly about why he thought so many Americans in that poll had “such profound concerns” about his “cognitive fitness.” Biden answered with “I have no idea.” And the press conference went on.
Ahhhh. But after the press conference there was, as Newsmax’s Greg Kelly reported on his evening show, liberal media umbrage at Rosen just for asking his question.
As Kelly noted, when a reporter like – in this case James Rosen – stands up and actually does his job, the “fake reporters get jealous, envious and really, really nasty.” He illustrated with a clip of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough as Scarborough said “I think the Newsmax guy asked if he (Biden) actually met the aliens. So give him (Biden) credit for going to people who were going to come at him with a crazy question.”
Kelly went on to note that the question “was obviously reasonable and they were shocked in the Beltway. He asked what Americans have noticed. Everyone in America has noticed that Joe has problems, but you’re not supposed to bring it up. No! That’s against their rules. Their informal, silly, clubby rules that serve them, not us.”
Kelly then pulled up a clip of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell saying this: “A reporter from Newsmax who, deep into this very long press conference asked a very personal question about Joe Biden – an absolutely disgraceful question.”
Curiously, Scarborough and O’Donnell both have a mysterious case of amnesia when it came to their own questioning if then-President Trump was mentally fit to be president. Here’s a headline from Scarborough, as reported right here on NewsBusters by Alexis Thomasi back in April of 2017, barely four months into Trump’s presidency:
Morning Joe Diagnoses Trump With a Mental Disorder
Move forward to November of 2017, and NewsBusters’ Chris Reeves caught Scarborough at it again:
Morning Joe Claims ‘People Close To’ Trump ‘Say He Is Mentally Unfit’, Has ‘Dementia’
By 2020, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was headlined this way:
This Will NBC stop? O’Donnell, Unglued: Trump Does Not Have ‘Human Emotions.
As NewsBusters’ Michael Dellanno reported, O’Donnell was pushing Mary Trump’s book (in which she makes plain her hatred of her uncle) that portrays the then-president as some sort of evil, souless freak:
Mary Trump shares with us the things Donald Trump is unable to feel. He can’t feel normal human emotions and empathy and so he’s not worried about what happens if children go back to school. He doesn’t worry about the death of teachers. Coronavirus can cause brain damage in children, but he isn’t concerned about that. He’s not worried about any of that. Mary Trump says he can’t feel sadness.
The same O’Donnell who was appalled at Rosen’s “absolutely disgraceful question” about Biden.
Unlike Rosen’s question, all of this garbage from Scarborough and O’Donnell was based not on the facts in a poll but rather on the mere Trump-hating political opinions of the two MSNBC hosts.
After showing the Scarborough and O’Donnell clips and others assessing Biden’s press conference as some sort of triumph (!!) Kelly smiled when Kelly returned.
Isn’t it amazing how their families rally around them? It’s fascinating. It’s fascinating. We are, in some ways losing our country. Because you understand that a country holds values which are common to all citizens. You could see, if you’re a reasonable person, that Joe Biden had a catastrophically bad press conference. But that’s not the way these guys see it. It’s the exact opposite. It’s very strange.
The press conference made it clear that James Rosen was a journalist. He didn’t make stuff up or concoct an imaginary story or ignore the elephant in the room. He used a poll – a factual event – to ask his question.
This is journalism. It’s something we rarely saw in Trump years, when CNN and other media spun the fairy tale about Trump-Russian collusion. There was not a shred of journalism involved in that episode – and the liberal media not only didn’t care, they aided and abetted the war on Trump simply out of personal and political animus.
What Americans saw close up in that exchange between Rosen and Biden, followed later by the reaction from the likes of Scarborough and O’Donnell, is the personification of what happens when real journalism is committed in the midst of fake news.
Fox’s Sean Hannity, in the wake of the Jussie Smollett case, said this:
The Smollett case represents another example of what I’ve been saying since 2007 and 2008: Journalism in this country is dead. The mainstream media consumes every story they find that supports their radical and extreme agendas in case after case.
The same was true of Kyle Rittenhouse, and Nicholas Sandmann. The effort was not made to be true journalism, and to find out the facts in these cases. Eventually, that backfired on the media – big time. And in Sandmann’s case, with a considerable financial payout from media organizations that threw real journalism under the bus to indulge in their favorite liberal narrative of the moment.
There is abroad in the journalism community an insistence on pushing X narrative – and any journalist who violates that narrative is to be condemned.
Joe Biden has been portrayed by the mainstream media as being just fine. There is nothing to be seen here. Then into a presidential press conference walks James Rosen to ask an obvious question based on a fact – the fact of that Politico/Morning Consult poll that had real hard polling data on the subject. You can certainly disagree with this poll as well as any others. Its existence and its contents cannot be denied.
To go after a real journalist doing his job for all to see says everything about Rosen’s critics – and those who attacked him for doing his job.
Shocking – not.
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